What's going on!

An editorial view from Christian Hennecke, editor of the VOICE Newsletter.

Working on this issue hasn't been easy. We all have been bewildered by the event
of September 11 and it was hard to concentrate on the VOICE Newsletter. We feel
especially with those who have lost relatives or friends or had to endure hours
of not knowing what happened to people. I don't want to go any further on this topic,
especially since I feel that other have done this much better than I would be able
to. Instead please see Pete Grubbs's article in the September issue of OS/2 eZine
- http://www.os2ezine.com/20010916/page_2.html.

Only lately have I found out that an OS/2 event took place in last year's September
in Southern Europe: Warpstock Mediteranee. According to the web site of Team OS/2
Spain, it went over two days and offered a number of presentations regarding OS/2
related topics. Back then, Mark Dodel asked for a review, but no one ever followed
through on it. All in all I wonder why there wasn't much more "advertising".
Probably many more people would have travelled to Spain.

Having been invited by the OS/2 User Group Belgium I attended the Warp-O-Que
on September 8, 2001 in Brussels. The Warp-O-Que is the group's yearly meeting where
you can chat with other users, watch and listen to presentations and - as the name
already suggests :-) - eat something. Apart from the members of the OS/2 User Group
Belgium other OS/2 users and developers from the Netherlands and Germany attended.
It is good to see that people from different countries are not fiddling around on
their own.

There I was able to get to know some interesting news. Achim Hasenmüller
brought with him a new version of Opera fresh from the latest code tree. The new
features include drag and drop of URL objects as we know them from Netscape. This
eliminates the strongest point of criticism against programs used with Odin: the
lack of WPS integration.

There was also a hint that the Odin project is working on fullscreen support
using Scitech's MGL.

According to Oliver Stein from IBM and Markus Montkowski the situation of USB
support is going to improve further. Markus Montkowski is currently working on porting
the Linux USB library, which could make creating support for - even more exotic
- USB devices much easier by enabling the use of Linux driver code.

Joachim Benjamins from Mensys told me that the shipping date for the German version
of eComStation had been delayed because they are actually translating more components
than initially planned. This will hopefully make waiting more endurable.

Speaking of eComStation: Connectix, Innotek and Serenity Systems have signed
contracts for creating a virtual machine for OS/2 (Virtual PC for OS/2), which makes
running other operating systems like Windows and Linux under OS/2 possible. The
approach is completely different from Odin's, as the virtual machine emulates a
complete PC. (Moreover, they want to offer an additional product that is able to
run OS/2 programs on the Windows platform.) It would be nice to be able to run a
Linux application in the virtual machine and have its interface displayed by HOBLink
X11 or XFree86/OS2. For more information please see Innotek's homepage at http://www.innotek.de.

It seems as if eComStation does induce some exciting developments.

Warpstock events: VOICE has decided to have a presence
at both Warpstock events this year. We will have a booth at both Warpstock 2001
in Toronto on October 6-8, Canada and Warpstock Europe at 'KH Limburg' College in
Diepenbeek, Belgium on November 2-4. We need some help covering the booth in Belgium,
so if you are going to the event, please volunteer to help. You would sit at the
booth, greeting interested people and handing out a brochure with a membership form
to anyone interested in joining VOICE. This is a critical investment for VOICE and
the OS/2-eCS community. VOICE has supported Warpstock for years now, and we have
been rewarded with at least enough new members to cover most of our expenses. So
please help.

It is also imperative that if you have any desire to attend Warpstock, you register
now. This will show your own personal support for these events. Like VOICE, these
are non-profit and put on by volunteers.These people need to know that their efforts
are appreciated.

Warpstock Europe almost didn't happen this year, and Warpstock 2002 is looking
questionable at this point, since no bids have been submitted yet. Please show you
care by attending these shows and meeting with other OS/2 users. The experience
is incredible. For those of you who still can't justify the travel because of distance,
then consider having next years Warpstock in your area. For information on submitting
bids, see the website for each event - Warpstock - http://www.warpstock.org/news/press/052501a.html
and for Warpstock Europe contact the organizers of the previous events: http://warpstock.os2.org/en/impressum.

VOICE Newsletter Update: We are making more progress
with our attempt to automate a lot of the newsletter assembly process using Dennis
Bareis's PPWizard pre-processor software. Though the transition has had a few kinks
in it, it has already helped in making the translation of the header/footer as well
as the info-boxes of each page easier and more reliable. For more on PPWizard see
Dennis's web site at http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/ppwizard.htm
.

We are also planning on adding a new page to the VOICE Newsletter to allow small
Freeware and OS/2 User advertisements. This would allow developers of freeware apps
to advertise their products by having a free banner ad on this page. Also OS/2-eCS
users and OS/2 user groups could place text ads seeking other OS/2-eCS users in
their geographical area to start/promote a user group or maybe just find someone
to help them with a support problem or have coffee with. If anyone is interested
in this concept please send me an email at ads@os2voice.org.
If anyone would like to help with editing this page for the newsletter, please contact
me at editor@os2voice.org.
As much as we try, a handful of people just can't do everything. We need everyone's
help. We are also revising our sponsorship levels to make it more affordable to
sponsor VOICE, and have banner ads on some pages of the Newsletter for shareware
and commercial OS/2 developers. You can view the status of that on our Sponsorship
page - http://www.os2voice.org/sponsorinfo.html.

We are always interested in your thoughts and views on subjects related to OS/2,
and would like to see opinion/editorial pieces as well as hardware/software reviews
and HowTo articles. If you can help by writing an article please contact me at editor@os2voice.org.
The Guidelines for Article Submissions to the VOICE Newsletter
page has been updated with the addition of some ideas for articles. Please take
a look and see if you can help us with an article for an upcoming issue. Some folks
find they enjoy telling about their OS/2 experiences. :-)

The Warp Doctor site: Have an idea for Warp Doctor?
You can send your comments directly to the Warp Doctor web guy Jeremy at rs@fyrelizard.com
or better yet attend one of our Warp Doctor Team meetings, weekly on IRC.

Please note that since September 2, the team now meets every Sunday at 2PM EDT
(18:00 GMT), on IRC in the #warpdoctor channel on the WEBBnet IRC network. For more
information on attending online Warp Doctor IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting
Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html.

VOICE Online Update: On September 13 there was a Speakup
with the organizers of Warpstock 2001. You can read the transcript at http://www.os2voice.org/logs/V091301.LOG.html.
There were also general membership meetings on September 3 and 17. You can review
the transcripts of these and other VOICE IRC events at http://www.os2voice.org/transcripts.html.
This month we have general member meetings on October 1 and 15 at 8PM EST (00:00
GMT, 02:00 Berlin). Everyone interested in OS/2 or eComstation is invited to attend
either or both of these sessions. For more information on attending online VOICE
IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html.

This month we start with the first of two articles on Partitioning
harddrives under OS/2. Eric Baerwaldt has a close look at DriveImage and
Partition Magic (both versions 3.04 and 6) by PowerQuest. Be aware that in this
article, Eric doesn't take into consideration the use of the LVM with these products.
If you used LVM for the partitioning, be sure to also read Eirik Overby's article
LVM, FDISK
and Partition Magic as well as A
Short Introduction to LVM and JFS by Michal Necasek. This article originally
was intended for the magazine OS/2 Only!. Many thanks to Eric for donating and updating
his article. And it looks as if we will "hear" more from him in the future.

After that Heiko Korsawe gives us an Introducton to
Perl. He leads us through installation and shows us a number of possibilies
for string output. Heiko also wrote this article for OS/2 Only!.

Herwig Bauernfeind again has some useful hints in the second part of Installing
Win32 Applications under Odin. He doesn't start on actual installation by
hand yet, but shows how you can reach your aims relatively automatically by working
around some obstacles.

In the last article of this month, File Sharing on the
Gnutella Network using LimeWire - Part 2, Timothy Sipples continues on Frank
Berke's topic from the July edition and provides us with some hints on how to best
install LimeWire, which are also helpful for other applications. Frank is still
working on his background article, but it has turned out much more complex than
he first thought.

That's it for this month. In November we have the second part of Eric Baerwaldt's
article on harddisk partitioning and the third part of Herwig Bauernfeinds series
on installing Win32 applications. Michal Necasek will return with an article on
OS/2 2.0 in his series on OS/2 History. Some more articles are in the works, e.g.
on installation and setup of the OpenWatcom compiler by Michal Necasek, a detailed
review of Xact 7.x by Stefan A. Deutscher and a review of Artem Wireless LAN-card
by Karlheinz Schmidthaus. The date of publishing hasn't been determined yet.